How A Former Colonial Power And Its Ex-Colony Are Faring In COVID-19 Fight
By Sheka Tarawalie - (Shekito)✍️
59 years ago, a sprightly 35-year-old Queen Elizabeth II took the long sea-journey on the Royal yacht Britannia to give her blessings to Sierra Leone’s Independence from Britain. Amid pomp and pageantry, and accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh, Her Majesty gave a message of hope to the then-blossoming former ‘Athens of West Africa’.
Last week, the occasion could not be celebrated. It was calibrated. COVID-19 had taken over: confirmed cases were rising and President Julius Maada Bio himself had to deliver the Independence Day message in quarantine. By the end of the week, a mishandling or manhandling of a corona-related incidence at the maximum Pademba Road prisons (where an inmate had tested positive and the authorities were vacillating on what to do with the rest of the inmates) left more people dead from gunshot wounds than from COVID-19 itself.
The situation has now become so messed up that one can hardly distinguish between the politics and the fight against the deadly virus.
My country has become a manufacturer of ‘politicovidiots’! And the consequences are foregone: death and tragedy. Sierra Leone was the last to record a confirmed case in West Africa on 31st March; now it has overtaken many African countries in the number of confirmed cases [225] and fatalities [14].
For example, my in-laws in Rwanda registered their index case on 14th March; and there has still been no death with 261 confirmed cases, of which 129 have recovered. Angola registered its first case on 21st March, and has a total of 36 thus far, with only 2 deaths. Botswana confirmed its index cases on 30th March and has only got a total of 23 and 1 death. Ethiopia had its first case on 13 March and has so far got a total of 162 with only 4 deaths…
Oh Salone! With a ruling party ‘mammy queen’ boasting in a widely-circulated audio message about being in the prison by 3am (which is supposed to be curfew time) way before the said riots began at around 8am, you should have seen masses of security personnel mingling with prisoners and civilians at the so-called correctional centre and its precincts, while others were doing running battles in the northern town of Lunsar and in Waterloo (a suburb in the outskirts of the capital city) for utterly outlandish reasons – in total disregard of the danger that Corona poses (not the least seeing an advanced former colonial power like the UK on course to become the second hardest-hit country in the world with fatalities close to 30,000).
And then a somewhat moribund main opposition, gasping for breath, went down the same moral low-ground with a press release stating that the political situation had become “unbearable” in trying to make a case for the safety of senior members of their party, instead of calling for an immediate and independent investigation of the prison mayhem to include international moral guarantors as well as opposition parties.
The lives of those killed – whether they are party members or not, high-profile or not – are as precious as all others. They are all citizens of the Republic which political parties profess to rule. And to at this time beat the “unbearable” drums is pandering towards more chaos.
Is death better than politics? Do these people even know what COVID-19 is? Or how lethal it could be? And now arrests of both the high and the low are being carried out in all manners (certainly in an anti-social-distancing manner).
Queen Elizabeth must be shedding tears not only for the UK but also for Sierra Leone. Perhaps more for the latter because of what potentially awaits the land of plentiful natural resources (she was given a sparkling diamond as a gift before departure in 1961).
In her corona-consolation speech to the nation on April 4, as British Monarch and Head of the Commonwealth (of which Sierra Leone is a member), the much-loved 95-year-old great-grandmother said: “I am speaking to you at what I know is an increasingly challenging time. A time of disruption in the life of our country: a disruption that has brought grief to some, financial difficulties to many, and enormous changes to the daily lives of us all…
Across the Commonwealth and around the world, we have seen heart-warming stories of people coming together to help others, be it through delivering food parcels and medicines, checking on neighbours, or converting businesses to help the relief effort…”
The latter is definitely not what is actually happening in Sierra Leone right now! Nothing can be more ironic as the Emergency Operations Centre’s own motto: ‘A Nation United Against COVID-19’. The team’s apparent ineptitude has been exposed by an abhorrent make-shift quarantine bed (with a grass mattress on top of school benches) in eastern Sierra Leone going viral on social media, and the double escape of a corona-positive individual (the same person who tested positive in prison after escaping from quarantine to commit a crime and was arrested has again escaped from the authorities… My oh my… and no one has been sacked for that).
While Britain is now making plans on how to get out of the corona woods, Sierra Leone is entering blindfolded! While Britain is celebrating the onerous effort of 100-year-old Captain-turned-Colonel Tom Moore for raising about 30 million pounds for the National Health Service, Sierra Leone’s Financial Secretary is disputing a token donation by a local bank to the government-established fledgling COVID-19 account.
Obviously, and understandably, Britain is constrained to come to our aid this time as she did during Ebola (in fact, the British High Commissioner and other embassy staff have gone into isolation after a British national they came in contact with before leaving Sierra Leone tested positive on arrival in the UK). And if things continue like this for a few months (with middle-class Lebanese merchant families leaving in droves), the administration’s financial feet-of-clay could be revealed, Sierra Leone’s Pandora’s Box could be opened, and Sierra Leoneans could be left with an emperor without clothes…
If not for Britain, it would have been very difficult - if not impossible - to end Ebola the way we did. Then-Prime Minister David Cameron’s response was remarkable as he quickly organised meetings in London with the Sierra Leone Government to find a solution.
British military and medical personnel (epidemiologists and NHS staff) made a swift ubiquitous presence by setting up a quickly-fitted treatment centre at Kerry town, just outside Freetown. Even a few British nurses - Pauline Cafferkey and William Pooley being the most celebrated - became infected in the process (thankfully, they survived). And many Sierra Leonean lives were saved. Yet, the only way a vaccine-less virus like Ebola was ended – applicable to COVID-19 today – was by everybody abiding by the ‘social distancing’ rules.
The question I have been asking myself is why current UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson was not shown the ‘Sierra Leone Ebola files’. Or was he? Why was Sierra Leone’s response-to-Ebola chapter not read in Britain?
Of course if it were Ebola that attacked the UK, it would have been immediately nipped in the bud (look at how Pauline and William recovered with NHS treatment – making the latter confident enough to return and complete the fight in Sierra Leone after he recovered). But this is COVID-19: vaccine-less, semi-airborne, ‘covered up’ in China, and could be transmitted by someone not showing symptoms at all.
To that end, COVID-19 has added to its vocabulary ‘masks’ which was absent both in Ebola and in earlier strains of the coronavirus.
What however beats many Sierra Leoneans’ imagination is the virus’ demystification of Britain’s scientific wizardry and self-sufficiency.
The residual average colonial mentality of the Queen’s country having everything in abundance is mocked, if not hurt, by this corona pandemic: that the National Health Service (NHS) lacks sufficient PPEs, ventilators, and testing kits beggars belief! A country that is prepared for nuclear war cannot easily contain corona?
The famed scientists, who even know what is happening on the moon and are planning to make a home there, have no ready answer here. Ok, Britain could lack things; but certainly they should not be plastic-looking things like PPEs…
Sierra Leone lost some of its best medical practitioners for lack of requisite equipment in the Ebola fight. The same is now happening in the UK! Today, it’s Turkey, of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, which is helping the UK out with PPEs. What a world!
What I am sure of, though, is that Britain’s health workers would not have to go on strike in the middle of the crisis for lack of pay as it happened in Sierra Leone during Ebola – and as it may happen there again if the corona fight is not taken more seriously by the Freetown authorities…
In order to break the chain of transmission, we have been in lockdown in Britain for six weeks running, with only a few complaints; while Sierra Leone is engaged in ding-dong intermittent three-day lockdowns. But this is because the British government can afford to provide financial cushions for its citizens.
In Sierra Leone, for most people, the bread and butter issues are a daily recurrence: if they don’t ‘grap-go-fen-am’ (get up and go find it), they will not eat...
An assurance for both the British and Sierra Leonean public is that this would surely pass … What however may be equally true is that, after this, life would never be the same again. Corona has exposed the ephemeral nature of life.
And that would be more pronounced (if you have not already lost a loved one) when you eventually return to work or to school or university or garage or taxi rank and find out that a friend or co-worker is not there anymore. Taken away by COVID-19. Even if all are safe, the traumatic experience would have taught you to take life easier and softer.
My advice – from experience of course - is to keep anxiety and expectation levels very low at this time. Even your most trusted loved one could anger you. If you perceive stress levels rising, divert your attention deliberately: at least my wife and I have three bedrooms to ourselves; and if that also seems small, one can go to the living room and watch TV; better still, there are flowers to tend in the facade and a back garden (with a shed) to find something to work on or play with; or one can take a walk to the nearby golf course.
These are not normal times!
If Pope Francis, the most spiritually visible person on earth, could be left all by himself in a usually jam-packed St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican, amidst death and lamentation all around him in Rome and Italy as a whole and the rest of the world, you should know that this is not the time for self-pity.
It took nearly two years for Ebola to be done away with in Sierra Leone (not helped by chain disruptions like the disease returning through the semen of survivors). May it be a shorter time for Britain; may it not be more lethal for Sierra Leone this time!
Queen Elizabeth’s first-ever Easter message, apparently precipitated by COVID-19, is worth quoting: “The discovery of the risen Christ on the first Easter Day gave His followers new hope and fresh purpose, and we can all take heart from this. We know that Coronavirus will not overcome us. As dark as death can be — particularly for those suffering with grief — light and life are greater. May the living flame of the Easter hope be a steady guide as we face the future…”
Much as the British people are enduring, I would only hope my Sierra Leonean countrymen and women would do as well. But the signs are not good – I must confess. Not with Germany, the European Union’s power-house, on the verge of cutting off support over “good governance, respect for human rights and combating corruption.”
But President Bio, resuming work today from isolation, may turn the tide like the biblical Saul-turned-Paul after his road-to-Damascus experience. The Sierra Leonean leader may need some lessons from British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who, after the self-same experience, returned to No 10 Downing Street (on the very day Sierra Leone was calibrating Independence) and made a “constructive half-hour phone call” to the opposition Labour leader Keir Starmer on the coronavirus fight (on the very day that the prison bedlam occurred in Sierra Leone). Both Johnson and Starmer are meeting today to discuss national issues in Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons!
War-time Sierra Leone President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, in bending over backwards to accommodate rebel leaders against the advice of his party’s hawkish apparatchik, once said: “It’s better to jaw-jaw than to war-war” (as I write, the police and young men are engaged in running battles in Tombo, another village in the outskirts of Freetown). The olive branch doesn’t hurt. It heals a nation. It takes nothing from him who heads Government!
Either way, no matter what, like the proverbial cat with nine lives (having not only battled and survived Ebola, but having previously been an inmate of the same Pademba Road prison for my journalism and had to go into hiding during the war for the same reason, and now being away from Sierra Leone during this politicorona turmoil), I hope to survive this COVID-19 ordeal in the UK. I pray you too can!
Because, in all this, prayer helps.
Sheka Tarawalie is a member of the UK’s National Union of Journalists (NUJ) and the author of ‘Pope Francis, Politics and the Mabanta Boy’ (https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/autobiography/pope-francis-politics-and-the-mabanta-boy/)
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